late nite lessons

i have always said that one of the perks of my life is that i get to hear a ton
of amazing stories. the strength and courage i see is so inspiring to me.
and i feel so lucky to get to hear them.

there's always a flip side, isn't there?
not all the stories are inspiring. some of them are so dark and so heavy
and so hard for me to hold.

the really good ones usually make it past me. i will tell someone else bits
of the stories to inspire them, i'll share with my sons or my guy and just
be thrilled.

it's the ones that never get past me that are the dark ones. i don't tell them.
i know how hard they are to carry and to hand them to another doesn't
seem like something i should do.

i get the person living them needing to tell them. and i think they should.
i think that totally matters and they should and they need to.
but there's no gain from my passing them on, and so i hold them.

in the past, sometimes they'd be too heavy to hold and i wouldn't know
what to do.

lately, tho, i'm working on the holding the dark along with the light.
i mean, i'm actually thinking about it and trying to figure out how to do that.

i lay in bed last nite thinking about that.

the room was dark.
and i thought of some darkness i was holding.
and i looked over at the open door.
it was a rectangle of light.
it wasn't bright light - it was faded light. maybe from
street lights from another room's window. i don't know.
but it was bright enough you could see the rectangle of the door frame.
and i could think about standing in the doorway of light.

i looked over at the window.......again, lighter than the dark room.
i looked at something that was in the room and it's shape of dark black.
i looked at the curtains against the window - dark black.

there were different shades of black and gray and light.

i started picking out things the black represented.
that lump of black right there, that's that story i'm holding from the other day.
and that big ol piece of black, that's what i'm tryin' to hold now.
and that light there? that's this part of my life.
and that light over there.....that's another part of my life.
and that big light? that's where i have to keep focused.

and it was the coolest thing.
for just a little bit that room was the perfect painting of my life and the
stories i live, hear and hold.

i could see how they all melded together. how some of the shades/stories
blended into each other. how there was small parts of light and big parts
of light.

and it didn't seem so awful as when i just held the one dark story.

i could see it was a roomful of stories, of living and of light in the darkness.

i think too often a single story will swallow me up.
i'll think that one single story is the whole room.
i'll forget it's just that black lump in the room over there.
and while yes, it's black and it's dark......there's a whole lot more in the room
along with it.

and i don't know how to explain it, but that helped me a whole lot.
and i'm gonna try to remember this when holding the darkness.